Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World

its nearby ocean, the Atlantic (both derived from the genitive form, meaning, appropriately, “of Atlas”). For Rudbeck, this was a no-brainer. Atlas was none other than the Swedish king Atle!

Now Rudbeck was proposing to compare figures from different historic periods and vastly different cultural traditions, and, many sober critics would say, figures with almost nothing in common besides a vague similarity in their names. But that had never stopped him before. Like Atlas, Atle was a powerful king, as clearly seen in the Norse poems and Atla-mal, and other slight references in the eddas. Atle controlled a large empire and a flourishing civilization, and as Plato had said, he had been easily corrupted, falling victim to his love of treasure. Atle’s kingdom was also utterly destroyed. His majestic halls with the “high-builded towers” and the “far-famed temples” disappeared forever, swept away in the “roaring flames.”

An ancient king of Atlantis with the honorary title Atlas.

This curious, shadowy figure of the Norse eddas was, again like Plato’s Atlas, only dimly known (for Plato’s Atlas is not Homer’s Atlas, the Titan who was forced to hold the world on his shoulders; the two are often confused). Yet Rudbeck believed Atle must have made quite an impression. Pulling out a map of Sweden, he rattled off a long list of places where the name of the Atlantean king was supposedly enshrined. There was Atle’s island (Atlesoo) on the beautiful lake Malaren, just outside Stockholm and also in one of the country’s oldest settlements. There were also Atle’s lake (Atlesjo), Atle’s village (Atleby or Alby), and a string of other places running throughout the kingdom. Sweden even had its own Atlas Mountains (Atlefjall). Indeed, just as Plato had said, King Atlas had left his name all over the country. Most dramatic, of course, was an old name for Sweden: Atland, which Rudbeck immediately translated as “Atlantis” (and incorporated into the Swedish title of the book, Atland eller Manheim).

Even if the differences between the ancient Greek and Norse figures were many, and the similarities vague at best, Rudbeck was overflowing with excitement. Consumed by his theory, he was determined to make it work. When a solution did not immediately present itself, Rudbeck was unwavering, laboring passionately and compulsively. Fears for his own “sickly constitution” evaporated in the whirlwind of enthusiasm.

As he saw it, the task was to hammer out the small details of the larger, grand vision of Atlantis that, in his frenzy, seemed more accurate with each passing day. Rudbeck had an explanation, for instance, as to why Plato had used the name Atlas and all he himself could find was the Swedish Atle. His answer was lifted straight from Plato’s own words:

Since Solon was planning to make use of the story for his own poetry, he had found, on investigating the meaning of the names, that those Egyptians who had first written them down had translated them into their own tongue. So he himself in turn recovered the original sense of each name and, rendering it into our tongue, wrote it down so.

In other words, by the time the story was recorded in the 380s B.C., the name of King Atle had been transformed from the language of Atlantis (Swedish) to Egyptian and then to Greek. After that, it was at the mercy of Solon’s discretionary interpretation and the whims of Critias’s childhood memory. No wonder, Rudbeck said, the name had been somewhat garbled over time.

Meanwhile, other distinguishing features of Atlantis were starting to cause more problems. For one, Plato was pretty clear that Atlantis was situated near the famous Pillars of Hercules, traditionally located at the Strait of Gibraltar, the narrow waterway separating southern Spain from northern Africa. According to ancient myth, the hero Hercules had set them up as the “far-famed witnesses of the farthest limit of voyaging.” Given such a position, it is no surprise that many had looked for the lost world in the mid-Atlantic or the Americas.

But Rudbeck soon had a proposal of his own. Forced back to the drawing board, he started repositioning his map of Atlantis. Placing the capital at Old Uppsala, with the kingdom stretching northward to the Arctic Kimmernes, the home of the Cimmerians at the halls of Hades and down to the southern tip of Skane, Rudbeck must have watched with amazement. Right in front of his eyes, he saw the Pillars of Hercules.

The answer seemed so clear, so obvious, that he wondered why no one had proposed it before: the real pillars must have been the Oresund, the strategic waterway that separated the kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden, and one of the most perilous straits in Europe. Dutch and English traders knew the spot well, and had long been forced to pay hefty tolls to the Crown that controlled this enviable gateway to the Baltic. The narrow strip of sea was where, incidentally, Hamlet’s castle was supposedly located, and where the lumbering Kronborg stands guard today.

Although he had no small confidence in his own mapmaking abilities, Rudbeck’s proposal that the Pillars of Hercules lay in Scandinavia was radical to say the least. Why should one make recourse to a Nordic location, in the face of such widespread, almost unanimous, opinion that the pillars were found at the conjunction of Spain and northern Africa?

Reading through texts widely and energetically, in his customary fashion, Rudbeck must have been thrilled to come across the words of one of the most esteemed geographers of antiquity, Strabo. In the first book of his encyclopedic geography of the world, this first-century authority counted no less than seven different interpretations of the meaning and location of the Pillars of Hercules. One of them, actually, was the mythic “Crashing Rocks,” the dangerous straits the Argonauts encountered on the quest for the Golden Fleece—and a location that must have been particularly appealing in light of Rudbeck’s own unconventional ideas about Jason’s voyage.

Another stimulating clue had, incidentally, come from the Roman historian Tacitus. In Germania, his account of the northern barbarian tribes, Tacitus records an observation from a Roman commander, Drusus Germanicus, exploring the north: “We have even ventured upon the Northern Ocean itself, and rumor has it that there are Pillars of Hercules in the far north.”

Suddenly Rudbeck’s suspicion that the location of the “Pillars of Hercules” was actually more complicated than usually presented seemed possible, hinted at by the historian and confirmed by the geographer. And once his mind got started on the matter, Rudbeck believed that the Swedish solution actually fulfilled the criteria more satisfactorily than the conventional site of Gibraltar.

After all, if the pillars had been set up to honor the glory of Hercules and mark the so-called limits of human endeavor, then why place them in a location where ancient peoples “sailed past them every year”? The far edge of the Mediterranean was certainly not the end of the world; ask the Phoenicians, ask the Carthaginians, ask anyone who presumably traded for the valuable tin found in Great Britain. This traditional Gibraltar location hardly made sense in either geographical or psychological terms. Sweden, on the other hand, offered another possibility.

Here rough, frigid, sometimes icy waters made sailing difficult if not impossible at certain times of the year, a fact that made this Scandinavian option a more likely place for the “limits of the ancient world” than Gibraltar. Here, too, right in the very spot that Rudbeck was proposing, were many place-names preserving the memory of a much older name.

All around the Oresund were small villages whose names, coincidentally, bore the root of Hercules: Herhal, Herhamber, and a host of others, including one as far away as Stockholm called Hercul. Rudbeck was growing so confident that he was on the right track with his new theory about the Pillars of Hercules that he would soon pronounce, in full stride, that the club-toting strongman and antiquity’s greatest warrior had originally been a Swede. His real name, found in many sagas and rune stones, was Harkolle, which meant literally “warrior chief” or perhaps “one dressed in a warrior’s clothes.” (Rudbeck contrasted his theory with one leading etymology that derived the name Hercules from the Greek words meaning “the glory of Hera”—an “unsatisfactory guess,” he said, when Hera hated Hercules’ guts.) Much more would indeed follow about the Swedish Hercules. For now the importance was clear. All these place-names near the Oresund were surviving memories of the original “Pillars of Hercules,” the treacherous northern straits that once marked the entrance to the kingdom of Atlantis.

With Plato’s distinct words and his own painstaking exploration fueled by a splendid imagination, Rudbeck could only marvel with joy at how well it all seemed to fall into place. For that was now becoming the method, relentlessly marching forward, and if each new discovery unleashed countless additional problems, then Rudbeck would figure it out, somehow, as he always did. He was also growing bolder in the process—more convinced of how little the past had really been understood, and more confident in his own ability to recover the lost truth.

Indeed, as Rudbeck looked at Atlantis, it seemed as if Plato had personally been to Sweden, and had